Mangaluru : The full stop, or period, for those of a slightly earlier vintage, is in danger of dropping out of English punctuation, at least according to David Crystal who is an authority on the subject and author of more than a hundred books on grammar and usage: so, should we rejoice that an insignificant member of the family, a mere dot on the landscape of the written word is set to disappear or take that as yet another striking and obvious example of the deterioration of good manners and good sense?

Part of the reason, if not all of it, is the manner in which text and other messages on social media in general have made the full stop redundant; it is too much of a bother, it stops the reader dead in his tracks and it means that the next sentence has to begin with the capital letter – and that calls for more work from thumbs and fingers especially on gadgets that aren’t as smart as the user, thus causing time to be wasted, time that can be better used sending more such messages…

The full stop can express a whole range of emotions, from stoic acceptance (“Ah well, I can’t do anything about it now) to ringing sarcasm, as when responding to a question from a friend who already owes you money but wants to borrow some more – when he asks, is it OK if I ask you for more money, and promises to pay everything within the next six months, the response, “Fine” indicates different things with different punctuation marks, as for example, if you had an exclamation mark, it would mean “yes, yes, of course, you jolly lad, old friend and what have you, I have no issue with that”, but with a full stop it means: “OK this one time which I hope will be the final time, but how long do you think we can keep up this charade?”

James Joyce, of course has already taught us the value of the dropped full stop in the final chapter of Ulysses where the stream of consciousness writing makes everything immediate throbbing and mirrors the way we think which is without punctuation of any sort and which you could rewrite with all the proper punctuations in place only if you wanted to destroy the poetry and the vividness of the experience all I can tell those who haven’t read that portion which ends triumphantly with the word Yes repeated a few times is to go ahead and do so now to get a clearer picture of how literature can often be ahead of twitter and facebook and social media in general which make use of the same technique without understanding what it means or perhaps they understand but don’t acknowledge what do you think?

Are the other punctuation marks in danger will we say goodbye to the semi-colon and its big brother the colon, the comma, the dash and hyphen, the ellipse, the apostrophe, the bracket.